Hypnospace Outlaw is an early internet simulator, a recreation of the world wide web from the 1990s – a thing not everybody used all the time. But it’s also a detective game with a story rippling through it, and there’s a mystery here to solve. And you solve it by surfing – rifling through the internet as it once was, looking for clues.
It’s remarkable how different things were. Incremental change is hard to spot day-by-day but when seen all at once, in some kind of dieting Before picture, it’s brazen. Oh, those halcyon days! The music blaring from every page! The fields of animations twirling in a never ending dance! The chaos, the garishness, like a teenager’s bedroom over and over again.
Hypnospace Outlaw reviewDeveloper: Tendershoot Publisher: No More RobotsPlatform: PCAvailability: Out now on Itch.io/GOG/Steam
It was a bold new frontier and an innocent one, a high street with no chain stores, no ubiquity. There was no discernible Google, no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Twitch. Back then, dial-up modems were the norm. Netflix was a DVD-by-post company, broadband still a fledgling thing. The internet was slow. Dialling download speeds of more than 3.5kbps was respectable – I nearly had a heart attack when my friend topped 60kbps with broadband.
Hypnospace Outlaw whisks you back there, in a time machine crafted with fastidious care. Every pixel of the old experience has been faithfully recreated down to the operating system you access it from: HypnOS. Download a Winamp-like player and reskin it, filling it with music from underground warez sites. Install a tamagotchi-like pet, which shits all over your desktop. Buy an extortionately priced McAfee-like antivirus program; download an internet speed booster; get caught up in a knock-off Pokemon craze. It’s all here.